League of Legends Adding New Ranked Requirements to Combat Smurfs and Bought Accounts

League of Legends has long dealt with issues regarding the buying and selling of leveled accounts to streamline access to ranked play with smurfs being both a separate yet intertwined part of that, too, since smurfs are prime account buyers. In a future update, Riot Games says that it’s going to implement more ranked requirements on top of the existing ones to make it so that fresh accounts can’t hop straight into ranked as soon as the option is available. Instead, they’ll be forced to play 10 normal, unranked matches on Summoner’s Rift before going into ranked.

Matt Leung-Harrison, the lead gameplay designer for League of Legends, previewed some of the plans for League‘s ranked mode that’ll be implemented in Patch 14.15. He said called the requirement to play 10 unranked Summoner’s Rift games a change that’s been “a long time coming” and that it took awhile to prepare, but it’s finally ready.

“In Patch 14.15, in addition to the changes we’re making to queue declining (see the last patch preview), we will be requiring that players have played 10 non-ranked SR games before entering Ranked queues,” Leung-Harrison said. “This change is a long time coming and we had a few things to iron out before sending it Live (and thanks to the teams that collaborated to make this happen).”

He also acknowledged some scenarios where new accounts that have just hit level 30 with 20 owned champions are legitimate accounts that just want to play ranked after meeting those thresholds. Sometimes legit players use bot matches or ARAM games to level up, he said, while others are people who want an alt account for whatever reason. While those with alts could technically be considered smurfs as well depending on what their main ranks are and their intentions for the alt accounts, Leung-Harrison said Riot’s trying to take factors like those into account.

“A reasonable amount of them also are alt accounts that we would like to place at their actual skill level, rather than erroneously placing too low and stomping everyone on the way up,” he said. “We are still committed to preventing and auditing accounts being leveled and exchanging owners for purposes like boosting and account selling through Vanguard and other technologies. We will also be paying attention to accounts that attempt to misrepresent their skills in these calibration games in order to be matched with lower skill players.”

These ranked changes and others previewed previously will be implemented in Patch 14.15.